Anurag Kashyap wanted to be scientist and win Nobel prize

He is one of the most noted filmmakers today, but director Anurag Kashyap initially had no plans of entering Bollywood and instead wanted to be a scientist.

Kashyap studied Zoology from Delhi with the dream of winning a Nobel prize, but eventually gave it up when he “discovered” cinema.

At the ongoing Jagran film festival, when the director was asked if he studied Zoology by accident or choice, Kashyap said “By choice. It was my childhood fantasy to win Nobel prize. I studied to be a scientist because I wanted to do something like that but then I gave up on that.”

The filmmaker said though he studied the course, it had no impact on the kind of realistic cinema he is associated with today.

“Till I finished my third year, I had no idea I would come into films. I did not discover cinema until I finished my college,” he said.

The 44-year-old director got his breakthrough as a co-writer in Ram Gopal Varma‘s “Satya” and revealed that he was so passionate about writing that he used to write for films and daily soaps, without getting paid or given credit.

“I used to get work but not money. It was easy because they knew I would ask neither money nor name. I asked for nothing. I knew someone will come who will say he should get his rightful credit,” he said.

“I got my first credit by Hansal Mehta for ‘Jayate’ and RGV for ‘Satya’. Before that I worked a lot. May be the industry knew me because I wrote many blockbusters where my name is not there,” he said.

The filmmaker, however, won’t reveal names of those films and says most of them were copied from other Hollywood movies, so he was “ashamed” to take credits for story writing.

“I will never take the names (of films) nor reveal in an interview. But people know for whom I’ve written. That time, 90 per cent films were copy so I used to not like putting my name anyway. It helped me both ways,” Anurag said.

“Then I decided at one point when I got so conscious of it that most of the films are copied even when I wrote (them), I used to take only dialogue credits. I stopped taking story credits. I was very ashamed of taking that,” he said.

Kashyap said the films that he wrote were based on somebody else’s ideas and were never his own, hence he did not have a problem of letting his name go by in the credits.

“The ideas never came from me. It was always of some other person who wanted someone to execute it. The ideas weren’t even something which made me want to include my name.

I just wanted to write. But if something has come from within me, I won’t let it go (without credits),” he said.

The filmmaker also revealed that “out of the 13-14 films I’ve made, I’ve got fees only for three films. Rest of them have been made for free.”